In 2016, you would have found Cam Loyet and his now wife, Haley, in their Illinois Wesleyan University dorm rooms making craft dark chocolate, sourcing cacao nibs from Peru, Haiti and Colombia and using local honey as the sole sweetener. The couple graduated and married in 2018, and in October 2019 launched an online business called Honeymoon Chocolates. Only two-and-a-half years later, in January 2022, the entrepreneurs opened their first brick-and-mortar space, a 5,000-square-foot factory and retail space under a three-year lease, in downtown Clayton, Missouri, just west of St. Louis.

Cam created a business plan for their company and attracted capital, including a unique scholarship for retail entrepreneurs through the ICSC Foundation. Under its Talent Incubator Project, the foundation had launched the Roslyn & Elliot Jaffe Retail Entrepreneur Scholarship in 2019 for students with emerging retail concepts. The Jaffe Family Foundation endowed the scholarship with $200,000 under the guidance of former Dressbarn chair Elise Jaffe. Her parents, Roslyn and Elliot, had founded Dressbarn in their own entrepreneurial effort 70 years ago. Loyet became the first recipient, applying the scholarship to his 2020-21 graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, from which he earned a Master of Business Administration degree. Haley, meanwhile, earned an undergraduate degree in biology from IWU and a doctor of medicine degree from Saint Louis University last year.

The Entrepreneurs Who Inspired the Scholarship

Elise Jaffe, who led the way as her family's foundation endowed the ICSC Foundation’s Roslyn & Elliot Jaffe Retail Entrepreneur Scholarship, entered the path to retail 70 years ago. It was in 1962 when the discount department store revolution took hold as Walmart, Target, Kmart, Shopko and Woolco all opened their first stores. Jaffe’s parents, Roslyn and Elliot, had themselves worked at department stores — Macy’s and Gimbels — and opened their own discount store in 1962, the first Dress Barn, in Stamford, Connecticut. Their model was to sell discounted women’s clothing to working women. Elise ultimately oversaw leasing for Dressbarn, became chair of the company and, before retiring, became senior vice president and real estate territory expert for Ascena after it acquired Dressbarn.

“They were entrepreneurs in their day,” Jaffe said of her parents, “so in setting up the scholarship, the idea was to celebrate young entrepreneurs like my parents. The idea is to generate some support for these kids while they are in school finishing up their degrees.” Many ICSC Foundation scholarships go to students studying real estate, but Jaffe chose to endow this scholarship for retailer entrepreneurs, who form the building blocks of the marketplaces industry now and in the future.

Jaffe’s gift provided Cam $5,000 toward tuition, fees, books and educational supplies, but the scholarship pulls some extra credit, too. It will pay all his expenses to attend an ICSC conference, provided complimentary ICSC student membership for one year and paired him with an industry mentor who helped him enact the business plan, which was a scholarship application requirement.

That real-life and real-time mentorship, from Holly Cohen, helped Cam progress from business plan to e-commerce and wholesale to omnichannel. “Each recipient has a different need for a mentor, and Holly was the perfect fit” for Cam, Jaffe said. Cohen runs her own retail advisory firm and was an ICSC trustee from 2010 through 2016. Aligned with Cam’s marketing education, her background includes marketing positions with retailers like Nike, Claire’s and J.Crew.

During the scholarship term, as Cam attended graduate school and worked with Haley to implement their business plan, Cohen and Cam touched base regularly over Zoom. “I would ask him a few days ahead of time for his thoughts and what he wanted to focus on because I didn’t want to approach those calls cold,” said Cohen.

The plan started with e-commerce and wholesale. As of February 2022, Honeymoon Chocolates is available online and in 100 stores, including Missouri’s Annex Coffee and Foods, Chocosphere, three Kansas City Whole Foods and California luxury supermarket chain Erewhon. And the chocolate maker plans to add more. “Holly was great at helping me strategize and finding that next best step to put the team in place to support 100 stores,” said Cam. “She held me accountable for everything that I said that we were going to do. It is much easier to understand what you are doing as an entrepreneur whenever you have someone from the outside looking in. It is easy to have your blinders on, and when you are the sole founders, it can be difficult to know exactly where each strategy might end up with the company.”

Brick-and-Mortar May Be Old School, but It’s Also Modern

Cohen coached Cam through the next phase of growth, as well. “We needed more brand awareness here in St. Louis,” he said. “We could have continued to stay in e-commerce and wholesale. But it just didn’t feel right to miss out on this market that is untapped, really, so we wanted to share it with St. Louis. Now, our whole process is kind of on display if you go to our factory.”

Cohen said: “I’ve spent a lot of my career helping online brands open bricks-and-mortar locations, and there is a crossroads there. They don’t want to abide by the old ways of thinking, but most of them come to realize they need to tap into that if they are going to be successful.”

So she advised Cam on site selection, landlord negotiations and additional brick-and-mortar considerations. “There are always going to be young entrepreneurs who have great ideas and want to ultimately have a physical presence for their product, and Cam had the grit and determination to make it happen and be successful,” she said. Cam said that prior to their discussions, he had no idea what a letter of intent was or the pitfalls of leasing physical space, though he was working with a local broker. “A lot of our conversations were around what questions he should be asking of his broker or what pitfalls he should not fall into as he’s evaluating an LOI or possible deal,” Cohen said.

Analyzing local demographics and potential store traffic played a key role in Honeymoon Chocolates’ site selection. “We originally looked at several locations around St. Louis and put in an offer on one, but it fell through, which was a blessing in disguise because it was very touristy but did not have a strong local St. Louis demographic. We ended up in a location that has a much better demographic, more walking traffic, and it still has tourists and people coming in from out of town.”

Once the lease was signed, Loyet got another education: in how lengthy the store-launch process is. “We were supposed to be open in October [2021] because we wanted to reach the holiday market here in St. Louis, but it is a really long process to get everything up and running. For what I needed, it was a lot of red tape to make sure everything was set up and we had proper plumbing and electrical and all the permits were approved.”

Nonetheless, Loyet intends to grow Honeymoon Chocolate’s physical footprint. “We will definitely need more manufacturing sites within the next few years,” he noted. The company is keeping its options open, perhaps expansion at the current space or maybe at a larger factory in or around St. Louis. And the company plans to embrace clean energy as it scales up. “Finding a way to create and manufacture a product cleanly is hopefully going to be that last foundation, that last pillar, that helps us to continue to grow and in the right way,” Loyet said.

For her part, Jaffe will continue to help brick-and-mortar-embracing retail entrepreneurs succeed and will continue to honor her parents’ legacy. “There are so many ways to interact with your customer, and bricks-and-mortar is one of them,” she said. “There’s nothing to say you can’t be a rock star with your online business, but you can use the bricks-and-mortar as your showroom. People have figured that out, and there are stores opening. It’s not a dead business because [physical retail] supports their internet business.”

Lauri Novick, ICSC Foundation president and ICSC senior vice president of volunteer engagement, added: “All of our efforts are really built around developing this new pipeline of talent for the industry. We need the rising, exciting new retailers who will help contribute and add to the industry, and scholarships are a great way to do that.” For the Jaffe scholarship’s first at bat, the foundation considers Honeymoon Chocolates a home run. “This really shows the success of what we are trying to do with the scholarship in terms of supporting and helping to develop new retail entrepreneurial talent,” Novick said.